Thursday, January 02, 2014

Tom Edwards grew up in a family that's been cutting trees and hauling timber in the Pacific Northwest for more than a century. The Spanaway, Wash., resident says he has worked as a logger since he was a kid - it's just what an able-bodied youngster was expected to do.

Now, at 53, with business in a slump and little money in savings, he's pessimistic about his chances of retiring.

"It's never going to happen. By the time I reach retirement age, there won't be Social Security. There's not going to be any money," Edwards said. "I'll do like my father did: I'll work 'til I die."

Across the U.S., such concerns are common among blue-collar baby boomers - the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

Many have jobs that provide paltry pensions or none at all, as many companies have been moving toward less generous retirement packages in the past decade.

Many boomers expect to work the rest of their lives because they have little cash put away for their old age and they worry Social Security won't cover their bills. Some hope to move to jobs that are less physically demanding.

The share of U.S. workers who are 55 and older is expected to continue growing, according to the "The Oxford Handbook of Retirement 2013." The group comprised 12.4 percent of the workforce in 1998. The share jumped to 18.1 percent in 2008 and is expected to be almost 25 percent by 2018.

The book is edited by Mo Wang, co-director of the Human Resource Research Center at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration. In an interview, Wang said it's a misconception that lower-wage workers are slackers in preparing for retirement.

"People don't have adequate earnings," Wang told The Associated Press. "It's not because they don't want to save. It's because they just can't."

Many people don't save enough for their own retirement because they lack financial literacy skills, Wang said.

Also, he said it can be incorrect to assume that people with lower incomes have more financial concerns than people with higher incomes. Psychologically, the important thing is the ratio of life earnings to wealth - how much money a person earns in a life span, compared to how much of it she gets to keep.

"Whether they have the 401(k) is not the decisive factor in influencing how well they live," Wang said. "Whether they have their own house is a big factor."

For homeowners, about 50 percent of wealth is typically tied up in the house and other investments, while a pension accounts for about 25 percent and Social Security accounts for about 25 percent, Wang said. For people who don't own their homes, particularly those who've worked low-income jobs, "Social Security is super important," he said. "Social Security is one way to pull them out of poverty."

People can receive full retirement benefits from Social Security between 65 and 67, depending on when they were born, and Medicare coverage at 65.

Farmers, loggers and other agriculture workers often have their wealth tied up in their homes or work property.

Business consultant Mike Salisbury of American Falls, Idaho, has spent more than three decades helping farmers plan their financial futures. He said the biggest concern for most is succession - whether any children want the farm once a farmer retires.

"Now, statistics pretty well show that about two-thirds of farm families do not have successors interested in coming back into the business," Salisbury said.

Without someone to take over the family business, farmers look for an exit strategy, he said. "There are some really complex tax ramifications for when a farmer decides to stop farming."

He said farmers approaching retirement want to know how to convert the equity in their land, fixtures, buildings and machinery into cash without having to pay the upper tax rates or having to pay taxes in a lump sum the day assets are sold. "We like to think of our farmers as just barely getting by and dirt poor," Salisbury said.

"For the vast majority of farmers today, the ones that survived the economic crash of the `80s, they're probably in pretty good shape."

People who've worked low-wage jobs for decades, such as 46-year-old Catherine Bacon of Durant, Miss., say they have a tough time envisioning an affordable retirement, even if that goal is decades away. Bacon worked 21 years in a catfish processing plant, cutting filets and hoisting bags of fish to make sure they weighed 15 pounds, never earning more than $16,000 a year. To supplement her income for nine of those years, she also worked weekends as a convenience store cashier. The seven-days-a-week routine meant she rarely saw her two oldest daughters when they were young.

The kind of retirement many Americans envision - travel, hobbies, leisure time without financial stress - is just a wistful fantasy for her.

Bacon is a single mother with two grown children and two younger children still living at home. Sitting at the kitchen counter of the double-wide trailer she rents from one of her sisters, she sighed.

"I haven't given up on living," Bacon said. "It's just, certain things I want to do, I know I won't do them. Traditional retirement - I won't have that."

Some blue-collar workers have employers who chip in toward retirement.

In Atlanta, 41-year-old Jason Baumgartner works as a master carpenter, helping build luxury homes. He said his employer contributes to a Roth IRA for him, and he puts in some money each week, as well.

He and his wife have a son who's about to turn 2, and they've consulted a financial planner. He said he wants to save enough money to start his own business and work for himself rather than for somebody else.

"I think the hours and, you know, the labor intensive stuff won't be as bad," Baumgartner said. "But, still, I plan on working until I'm 60, 75. Well, 70."

In the southern Louisiana fishing village of Lafitte, Robert Boudreaux's cut and callused hands worked quickly, spinning, looping and threading twine that would, when finished, be a fishing net used by fishermen to trawl for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a trade Boudreaux, 52, has practiced for decades in the small net shop he owns - and something he may end up doing longer than he had anticipated.

"To plan for retirement in today's economy is very, very hard because peopl who started planning for retirement years ago put money on the side in IRAs and stuff like that, and the way the economy is and the interest rate is, they don't get anything anymore," Boudreaux said. Boudreaux said he opened his net shop in 1980 and has also been a part of a family boat-making business since 1981.

He said he invested thousands into IRAs that today are worth very little. It's disappointing, he said, but the good news is that he loves what he does and probably wouldn't retire even if he had the means.

"Most of the people that's in the community - that's fishermen, that's small business owners - they don't retire," he said. "They work until they pass on."

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Over 12 years into the so-called “Global War on Terror,” the United States appears to be striking terror into the hearts of the rest of the world.

In their annual End of Year survey, Win/Gallup International found that the United States is considered the number one “greatest threat to peace in the world today” by people across the globe.

The poll of 67,806 respondents from 65 countries found that the U.S. won this dubious distinction by a landslide, as revealed in the chart below.

The BBC explains that the U.S. was deemed a threat by geopolitical allies as well as foes, including a significant portion of U.S. society.

Predictable in some areas (the Middle East and North Africa) but less so in others. Eastern Europe’s 32% figure may be heavily influenced by Russia and Ukraine, but across most of Western Europe there are also lots of figures in the high teens.

In the Americas themselves, decades of US meddling have left an awkward legacy. Its neighbours, Mexico (37%) and Canada (17%), clearly have issues. Even 13% of Americans see their own country as a danger.

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If not stopped once and for all by the American public the Obama criminals will most likely achieve their goal of destroying the United StatesPRESS TV
12/31/2013

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.

Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.

The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.

Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.

The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.

I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.

The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.

When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?

If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.

Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.

The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.

Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.

Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police.

“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.

The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.

This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.

I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.

When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.

In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.

According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.

From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.

In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.

HSN/HSN

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
is an American economist who served as an Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury in the Reagan Administration and was noted as a co-founder of
Reaganomics. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street
Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He has
testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of
economic policy. During the 21st century, Roberts has frequently written
extensively about the effects of the Bush (and later Obama)
administrations related to the War on Terror, which he says have
destroyed the US Constitution's protections of Americans' civil
liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process. He has taken positions
different from former Republican allies, opposing the War on Drugs and
the War on Terror, and criticizing Israel's policies and actions against
the Palestinians. More articles by Dr. Roberts

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A panicking Obama now willing to spark WWIII to save his own ass from the ongoing Snowden revelationsPRESS TV
01/01/2014

An analyst says the US has an “impetus to express military hostility” toward a rising China and warns that a potential conflict between the two superpowers could lead to a “nuclear war.”

“If the United States and China actually went to war, there is a strong possibility of a nuclear war, either between China and the United States or between Russia and the United States as an ally of China potentially or in the event to protect its own geopolitical interests,” Don DeBar told Press TV on Wednesday.

He made the comments after a Russian expert said China would be able to defeat the United States during a possible conflict in the Asia-Pacific region within the next six years.

“It’s highly probable that China, after the completion of the current cycle of reforming and rearming its armed forces through 2020, will be capable of defeating US forces and its allies in the course of some local conflict in East Asia,” Vassily Kashin wrote in an editorial published by the Voice of Russia last week.

“Today the US is facing an internal crisis and dearth of funds” which will force America to “accept defeat” in a future battle, according to Kashin, a senior research fellow at the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

DeBar, however, said the possibility of a full-blown military conflict between China and the United States in the Pacific is an “interesting speculation.”

“There is a conflict of interests that exists between these two powers and there is willingness on the part of the United States to use war as one of the parts of its tool box,” he said.

“China is I think more mature in many ways and certainly not hostile power like the United States is and so hopefully that, and just general sanity, means if there is a battle it will not escalate into a greater war,” he added.

AGB/HJ

This news bureau contains copyrighted
material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the
copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to
advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in
section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research
and educational purposes.

We have already discussed in the first part of this analysis how the American geography dooms whoever controls the territory to being a global power, but there are a number of other outcomes that shape what that power will be like. The first and most critical is the impact of that geography on the American mindset.

This e-mail outlines and confirms the acts of espionage against Indonesia and Indonesians by Akiko Makino and the others involved both in Kobe University and in AI Lab at University of Airlangga, Surabaya; Bahasa Indonesia original follows English translation...

The 5th Estate has just purchased a library on H5N1 "Novel" virus pandemics, there are dozens of PDF and Exel documents we feel will assist you in saving lives following intentional releases of the H5N1 and now MERS viruses; we will begin by printing those that appear to be extremely relevant here: H5N1 Kobe-Kawaoka-Ernala series continues soon with more "Smoking Gun" e-mails from Teridah Ernala to The 5th Estate . . .